Some actual animation!!!

Time to put some life into this...thing.

Below is the Mental Ray look; took three hours and made my lap-top do an impression of a George Foreman grill, and that was without knocking the background out of focus. So I did the Mental Ray movie render (only 80 frames of animation) on some of the Uni machines last week.

Mental Ray rendered version.

Below is a render using software. Still looks pretty good, and I can see the animation but it really lacks the beams of light turning in the background.

Software Version

Nothing fancy, just straight ahead animation and I have not played with the curves via the graph editor yet.

Looking at the lighting in the Mental Ray version the beams are more distracting than expected so I am going to slow them down a lot and make them less visible.

More soon, including the guy with the big hands!!

CGI December 2015: quick update

It's been a long time since I put up any new images of my robots here but they are still progressing.

After a long break; where I was too basically busy to work on them, I have given everything a big overhaul. New story, same characters. The environment is now way simpler, with the same animated beams of light.



The characters stand out more without all that unnecessary clutter. The robots have had some of the gaps in their body parts filled in with extra geometry. This should improve their silhouettes greatly and the robots are sporting a cool black and yellow colour scheme.

Test animation will be rendered without the fancy lighting as it is inclined to make my computers fan sound like a jumbo jet taking off. It is also rather slooooooooooow!

More soon time permitting.

Diesel Update: #12

OK. Here is, pretty much, the final look of 'Diesel'; the character from my film. Anyone who has looked at this blog before will notice that this was to be one of the general robots, not the star.

This one was the last to be made, so it is the best as I improved as I went along. From the point of view of the story, Diesel has to look cobbled together, a bit home made and rough around the edges. This robot fits the bill. The original one looks too 'production line' (that one will be one of the general lifting bots seen throughout the film.

Diesel has lots of protective guard rails near his joints. This to too protect people from his moving parts when his is near them.

The other robots do not have many of these as they have to appear more of a threat.

The two devices on his back are mad-professor type generators. They should have Metropolis like electricity effects running up and down them.

The spine has cable joining each part, again this makes his systems look raw and exposed.

These are the hands from the original Diesel. So I swapped them over. He needs them for expressive movements and gestures. This robot also has a second set of smaller arms, with very basic fingers. Should be fun to animate (I hope).

I also swapped heads. This head has guard handles top and bottom that pivot where they join the head. The top one will act as his brow, the bottom as a chin.

The four arms radiating out from the eye are independent, each one holding one quarter of the eye ring.

To allow him to blink there is a small windscreen wiper type device mounted to the right of his eyeball.

Extra heel-toe for stability. It will clunk down on every step.

Diesel update #10

Rigging begins for the Stalker robot.

Diesel_update_#9

This should be the final head design for Diesel. The eye has a rotating focus ring, and the outer circular guard is split in to four independent pieces. This is so that I can get some facial expressions without him actually having a face in the traditional sense.

The arms sprouting out of his back look like guns, but aren't. You will have to wait to see what they are really for.

They will magically fold out of two lockers on his back, very Chuck Jones.

I grouped the geometry so that I could pose him prior to rigging. This brought up a number of problem areas; so more tweaking. This also applied to the welding robot, now referred to a Stalker.

The Stalker had very noticeable cables for a while.  I felt that they took something away from his deliberatley angular styling and poses, generally upsetting the shape hierarchy, so I ditched them.

 

I have started adding some much subtler cabling detail to Diesel, they add detail and functionality without effecting his shape hierarchy.

 

This is the first time that I have applied a material to Diesel. I am torn between detailed worn-robot textures (time consuming) or black-&-white simplicity (below, achievable). I think I know which way that will end up going.

B Movie update

Here are some more images for my B-Movie film. These are rough sculpts of one of the human types that will be made in Maya. Unlike Super Hands (who, incidentally, is now called 'Diesel') they start life as physical sculptures.

I am sculpting them using aluminum wire armatures and New Plaste clay. When complete they will be scanned with a laser to turn them into detailed files that I can work with in Maya.

Each human character has a normal state, and an emaciated, zombie like, condition. To save on sculpting time I am doing this as a single sculpt, then duplicating each side to make whole figures. See the Photoshopped images at the bottom for an idea of how they will look (need wider hips on the zombie type though).

 This is supposed to be a mechanic / workman type. The kind of guy usually seen flying backwards over some barrels in a James Bond film as the secret base blows up at the end...

 And this is the basis of his less-than-healthy counterpart...

There will be a female version, also male and female business types in suits.

Diesel the Robot is changing slightly. The main difference is his head, which has to be more expressive; still working on that. Plus his head has to have more of a non-symmetrical, almost home made look compared to the rest of his body.

 I have deliberately gone for a cine-camera look to the head, with the eyes looking like the turret mounted lenses on the front of my Dads clockwork powered Viscount Double 8mm cine camera. That camera, somewhat surprisingly, was able to take single frames, ideal for a young animator.

I will post more work as and when it happens.